March 10, 2003

The Marx of the Anti-Semites

The Culture of Critique
by Kevin MacDonald

——————————

[Couple of notes here. (1) The review title, like most titles
of pieces, was not mine. It
was thought up by the editors of The American Conservative. For the record, I submitted this review under the
suggested title "The Jew
Thing." (2) This review generated a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with readers and commentators. I have put
some of this, with my own
responses to it, following this review.]

——————————

One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the U.S.A., I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types,
standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, a lot of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could
not take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in
Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name
had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and
full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so.
"Oh," explained one of my companions, "he got the Jew thing." The others in our group all nodded their understanding.
Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a
cracked engine block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing.
They shoot horses, don't they?

Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United
States, an exceptionally lethal
one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal
integrity allowed, not to get the
Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew
thing — that I am in fact a
philosemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the
nimble web surfer to find.

If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin
MacDonald is your man.
MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology at California State University in Long Beach. He is best known for his
three books about the Jews,
developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so been a "group evolutionary strategy." The subject
of this review is a
re-issue, in soft cover, of the third and most controversial of those books, The Culture of Critique, first
published in 1998. Its subtitle
is: "An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political
movements." The re-issue differs from
the original mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface, which covers some more recent developments in the field, and
offers responses to some of
the criticisms that appeared when the book was first published. The number of footnotes has also been increased, from
135 to 181, and they have all
been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book. A small amount of extra material has been added to the text.
So far as I could tell from
a cursory comparison of the two editions, nothing has been subtracted.

The main thrust of this book's argument is that Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged
in a deliberate campaign to
de-legitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations — most particularly the U.S.A. — through
the twentieth century, and
that this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethny. In MacDonald's own words:
"[T]he rise of Jewish
power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of
CofC." He illustrates his
thesis by a close analysis of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the
social sciences (most
particularly the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in
left-wing politics, the
psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of
individual psychopathology),
the "New York intellectuals" centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish
involvement in shaping U.S.
immigration policy.

MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology — a term that many writers would
put in quotes, as the
epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate. I have a few doubts of my own on this score, and
sometimes wonder whether
evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the
U.S.A., are susceptible to.
The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads: Behaviorism, Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape
(ectomorph, mesomorph,
endomorph), the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on. I think that
the evolutionary
psychologists are probably on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be improbable and
unpleasantly nihilistic. Here,
for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book: "The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to
attain evolutionary
goals." This trembles on the edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that
philosopher David Stove called
"puppetry theory," and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of
Critique. After all, if it
is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists are pursuing their own "group evolutionary
strategy"? And that, in
criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading,
any further?

To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that. The Culture of Critique
includes many good things. There
is a spirited defense of scientific method, for example. One of the sub-themes of the book is that Jews are awfully
good at creating
pseudosciences — elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact,
have any truth
content — and that this peculiar talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long
pre-Enlightenment centuries,
of immersing young men in the study of a vast body of argumentative writing, with status in the community —
and marriage options, and
breeding opportunities — awarded to those who have best mastered this mass of meaningless esoterica. (This
is not an original
observation, and the author does not claim it as such. In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect,
and earlier comments along
these lines were made by Koestler and Popper.) MacDonald is very scathing about these circular and self-referential
thought-systems, especially in
the case of psychoanalysis and the "pathologization of Gentile culture" promoted by the Frankfurt School.
Here he was precisely on my
wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on. Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories, there is no
doubt he believes himself to be
doing careful objective science. The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey et al.

It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not
driven by any belief
on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority, but by a desire to stabilize the nation's ethnic balance, which is by no means the same
thing. (In fact, as MacDonald points out, one of the worries of the restrictionists was that more clever and energetic races like the Japanese would, if
allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.) MacDonald's chapter on "Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy" is a
detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere. If the Jews learned anything from the twentieth century, it was surely the peril inherent in
being the only identifiable minority in a society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous. That thoughtful Jewish-Americans should seek to avoid this fate
is understandable. That their agitation was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy seems to me more doubtful. And if it is true, we must
believe that 97 per cent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of the other 3 per cent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the
one Shakespeare's Bianca would have said: "The more fool they."

Similarly with MacDonald's discussion of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire and the many horrors that ensued. This was
until recently another taboo topic, though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn, presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose, has recently taken a crack at it.
I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here. Having posited that Jews are out to "destroy" (this is his own word) Gentile society, he was open
to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying, the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance, Gentiles don't actually have much
to worry about. So: the Jews destroyed Russia. Though MacDonald's discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating, it left me unconvinced. As he
says: "The issue of the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex." Paul Johnson gives only 15-20 percent of the
delegates at early Party congresses as Jewish. If the other 80-85 per cent were permitting themselves to be manipulated by such a small minority, then we are
back with Bianca.

Since the notion of "group evolutionary strategy" is central to MacDonald's case, I wish he had been
better able to convince me of
its validity. For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation
which, like the diaspora Jews,
awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of
content-free written material.
Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China's history knows that the guy who gets the
girl — who ends up, in fact,
with a bevy of "secondary wives" who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one
who has aced the Imperial
examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position. This went on for two thousand years. Today's
Chinese even, like Ashkenazi
Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean. So: was Confucianism a
"group evolutionary
strategy"? If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald's jargon, the "ingroup". But
then … what was
the "outgroup"?

The more I think about the term "group evolutionary strategy," in fact, the more I wonder if it is not
complete nonsense. From an
evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from A.D. 79
to A.D. 1800 or so have been
conversion to Christianity? Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology, wouldn't a better strategy have
been to learn, say, fencing, or
Latin? Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years. The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across
many centuries; yet their
"group evolutionary strategy" was the opposite of the Jews' at almost every point. And the Jewish
over-representation in important power
centers of Gentile host societies became possible only after Jewish emancipation — which, like abolition of
the slave trade, was an
entirely white-Gentile project! Did the genes of 12th-century Jews "know" emancipation was going to happen
700 years on? How? If they
didn't, what was the point of their "evolutionary strategy"? There is a whiff of teleology about this whole
business.

Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field. There is no disputing the fact that we need to understand
much more than we currently do
about how common-ancestry groups react with each other. Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and
multicultural societies. Up till
about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance, very much as
Israel copes with them today by
asserting Jewish ethnic dominance. This proved to be quite a stable arrangement, as social arrangements go. It was
obviously objectionable to some
American Jews, and it is not surprising that they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it; but they were not the
sole, nor even the prime,
movers in its downfall. It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement, characterized by racial guilt,
shame, apology, and
recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering ("affirmative action"). This system, I think
it is becoming clear, has
proved less stable than what went before, and has probably now reached the point where it cannot be sustained much
longer. What will replace it?
What will the new arrangement be?

At times of flux like this, there are naturally people whose preference is for a return to the older
dispensation. It is obvious that Kevin
MacDonald is one of these people. If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like: "the
ethnic interests of white
Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society." Personally, I think he's dreaming. The
older dispensation wasn't as
bad as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe, but it is gone for ever, and will not return. For
America, the toothpaste is
out of the tube.

And on the point of Israel having something very much like the old American dispensation, I am unimpressed by
MacDonald's oft-repeated
argument — it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and antisemites — that it is hypocritical for
Jews to promote
multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. Unless you think that ethnic
dominance, under appropriate
restraining laws, is immoral per se — and I don't, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn't, either —
it can be the foundation of a
stable and successful nation. A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so. The U.S.A. was
not able to maintain it,
because too many Americans — far more than 3 per cent — came to think it violated Constitutional
principles. Israel, however,
was founded on different principles, and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country for dismantling
Jewish-ethnic dominance, as
there was in Lyndon Johnson's America for dismantling European dominance. The Israelis, most of them, are happy with
Jewish-ethnic dominance, and
intend to keep it going. Good luck to them.

The aspect of MacDonald's thesis that I find least digestible is his underlying assumption that group conflict
is a zero-sum game, rooted in
an evolutionary tussle over finite resources. This is not even true on an international scale, as the growing wealth
of the whole world during this
past few decades has shown. On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd. These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific
phenomena that The Culture of
Critique is concerned with — Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and so
on — were they a net
negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were. Now conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose
the great post-1881
immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred. Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003 were not the two
to four per cent (depending on
your definitions) that it is, but the 0.3 per cent it was at the start of the Civil War. Would anything have been
lost? Would America be richer,
or poorer? Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier, or duller?

It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost: entrepreneurs, jurists,
philanthropists, entertainers, publishers,
and legions upon legions of scholars: not mere psychoanalysts and "critical theorists," but physicists,
mathematicians, medical
researchers, historians, economists — even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface, evolutionary
psychologists! The first
American song whose words I knew was "White Christmas," written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish
immigrant. The first boss I ever
had in this country was a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps. Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald
claims, that "most of those
prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union [i.e. in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews." It is also true, however,
that much of the secret
research they betrayed to their country's enemies was the work of Jewish scientists. The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to
the Soviets; but without
Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell. Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians
attempting to crack a particularly
intractable problem in analytic number theory. A high proportion of the 200-odd attendees were Jews, including at
least two from Israel. Sowers of
discord there have certainly been, but on balance, I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously
better off for the
contributions of Jews. Similarly for every other nation that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish
citizens. Was Hungary better
off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich? Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions? "To
ask the question is to
answer it."

Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist, is not obliged to provide any such balance in
his works, any more than a
clinical pathologist writing about disease should be expected to include an acknowledgment that most of his readers
will be healthy for most of
their lives. I agree. A scientist, even a social scientist, need not present any facts other than those he has
uncovered by diligent inquiry in
his particular narrow field. He is under no obligation, as a scientist, to soothe the feelings of those whose
sensibilities might be offended by
his discoveries. Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald's material, however, it wouldn't have hurt to point
out the huge, indisputably
net-positive, contributions of Jews to America, right at the beginning of his book, and again at the end. MacDonald
has in any case been fairly
free in CofC with his own opinions on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on.
He is entitled to those
opinions: but having included them in this book, his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific
objectivity does not sound very
convincing.

This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an antisemitic book. Its entire argument is that
the Jews, collectively, are
up to no good. This may of course be true, and MacDonald is entitled to say that the issue of whether his results are
antisemitic is nugatory, from
a social-science point of view, by comparison with the issue of their truth content. I agree with that, too: but
given the well-known history of
this topic, it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald not to keep a jar of oil close at hand to spread on the troubled
waters his work is bound to
stir up. From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man, I would put this down to a personality
combination of prickliness and
unworldliness, but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and
that there is not malice
lurking behind MacDonald's elaborate sociological jargon.

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[This review brought me a huge volume of e-mail, and regular mail too, and was the
occasion of much
comment in Internet discussion groups and elsewhere.

Rather than repeat myself, I have posted some of the commoner remarks here, with my responses to them.

Kevin MacDonald tells me he will post his own review of my review on his personal website
here. He has
already sent me a copy, which was the basis for some of my comments below.

For my 8/21/00 National Review Online article "Is Antisemitism Dead?" see
here.
For my 4/10/01 National Review Online article "The Jews and I," see
here. (Note: Kevin refers to this article in
his review of my review.)]

——————————

• Responses to common remarks

Comment. Having admitted in "The Jews and I" that I do not understand the theory
of "group evolutionary
strategy," on which The Culture of Critique rests, I have no standing to pass an opinion on the book.

Response. Kevin MacDonald is an academic. He spends his life preparing papers for
publication in learned journals, or for
presentation at scholarly gatherings, where his academic peers can discuss and criticize them. That is the main thing
that academics do.
Occasionally, however, an academic feels the urge to write a book for the general public. When he does so, he exposes
himself to the attentions of
lay reviewers, and he must take his chances with them. Part of the system for bringing new books into the world is the
giving of them to decently
well educated but non-specialist drudges, to read and pass an opinion on for a fee of (usually) a few hundred
dollars.

Now, this is an unsatisfactory system in all sorts of ways, especially for academics. Bertrand Russell said:
"I would rather be
reviewed by my worst enemy among philosophers than by a friend ignorant of philosophy." I sympathize. However,
this system, as unsatisfactory
as it may be, has been going along for 300 years now, during which time nobody has been able to think of a better one.
Academics who are seriously
unhappy with it have the choice to stay comfortably ensconced in the world of peer review. Nobody is going to force
them to publish for a general
market, or to expose themselves to the attentions of ink-stained ignoramuses who read books for (gasp!) money.

The fact that academics frequently do venture into the general book market is not a mark of their folly
or unworldliness. Rather the
contrary: they know that even wrong-headed or uncomprehending reviews — even bad reviews —
generate interest, create sales,
and make money. An academic can, in fact, get considerably rich from bad and stupid reviews — ask Charles
Murray. In conversation with
Kevin MacDonald, I have never heard him complain about bad reviews. What he complains about, constantly, is that
nobody reviews his books.
With that, I really do sympathize. Kevin has interesting things to say, based on years of study and reflection. He
ought to be heard.

Comment. MacDonald is an antisemite. You should not pay attention to people like that. It
only encourages them.

Response. I have an open mind about whether Kevin is an antisemite, and am not much
interested in the matter. The
Culture of Critique is a solid book, dense with arguments, references, and examples. Faced with a book of that
type, the question a reviewer
should tackle is not: "Why did the guy write this book?" The question is: "Does he make the case he
has set out to make?"
People write books from all sorts of motives, some of them disreputable. (Vanity and greed predominate.) A book that
has obviously been written
with great care, after long research, deserves to be taken on its own terms, as an extended argument. Does the author
prove his case? That is the
main question a reviewer should try to answer.

As strongly as I believe in anything, I believe in free enquiry and open debate. I believe in the marketplace
of ideas. I believe that
"sunlight is the best disinfectant." I don't like the idea that there are certain things we should not talk
about. The influence of Jews
on 20th-century society, particularly American society, is an interesting topic. I have often found myself thinking
about it. Kevin has a lot to
say about it. The Culture of Critique is an interesting book. (It is also, by the way, better-written than
most books by
academics — though this is not a very extraordinary achievement.)

Comment. Er, wait a minute. You just said you "have an open mind about whether Kevin
is an antisemite." Yet
in your review you say that The Culture of Critique "is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the
term, an antisemitic
book." If Kevin's book is antisemitic, how can he not be an antisemite?

Response. By being a scientist. Science is "cold." That is, it doesn't care
about the researcher's feelings.
Kepler was a Ptolemian in astronomy: he believed the planets moved in epicycles. After calculating and
re-calculating, he slowly came to accept
that this could not be so, that the planets move in ellipses. He only accepted this with extreme reluctance, though.
I'm not sure you could ever
say that he stopped being a Ptolemian and became a full Keplerian. That's what science is like. It has no respect for
the feelings of the
scientist. Now, Kevin MacDonald claims to be doing cold, objective social science, and I have taken him at his word on
that, not knowing any
grounds for supposing otherwise. A researcher doing cold, objective social science on the history and sociology of the
Jews might come to the
conclusion, as Kevin has, that they practice a "group evolutionary strategy," one of whose 20th-century
manifestations was a campaign to
destroy Gentile culture. This researcher might come to this conclusion very reluctantly, like Kepler. He might be a
philosemite, or even a Jew. A
man and a book are two different things. A man who is not an antisemite might do research that led to antisemitic
conclusions. If he set them out
in a book, that would of course be an antisemitic book.

Is this actually the case with Kevin MacDonald? Just as I said, I have an open mind on the issue, and don't
find it very interesting. I
reviewed Kevin's book in the spirit I have already described, trying to assess whether his arguments prove his
conclusions. Those conclusions are
antisemitic. They say that the Jews are up to no good. That is antisemitic. What else is it?

Comment. You have done a complete one-eighty, having said you found MacDonald's arguments
"persuasive" in
"The Jews and I," then pooh-poohing them in this review.

Response. Here is the only reference to Kevin in "The Jews and I" (for the full
text, see the link I have
provided above):

I also find the theories of Kevin Macdonald (The Culture of Critique) about the partly malign
influence of Jews on modern
American culture very persuasive — though this is not an endorsement of Macdonald's theory of "group
evolutionary strategies,"
which I do not understand.

Now, here I am in my American Conservative review:

These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned
with — Boasian
anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and so on — were they a net negative for America? Yes, I
agree with MacDonald, they
were.

I don't myself see a lot of daylight between these two remarks. Now, I certainly do contradict myself
sometimes. In calendar year 2002 I
published over 194,000 words of commentary and review on a wide array of topics. That is considerably more words than
there are in the New
Testament. (And that was a slack year for my journalism, as I also produced a 400-page book.) You try
writing 194,000 words of
commentary without contradicting yourself. I am generally unembarrassed about contradictions. In this particular
case, though, I don't see it.

Comment. It is insulting to call MacDonald "the Marx of the antisemites."

Response. I'm not sure that it is. In any case, whether it is or not, I am not responsible.
The titles of magazine
pieces are mostly thought up by editors and sub-editors. So it was in this case. I submitted the review under the
title "The Jew Thing."
If you don't like the published title, take it up with the editors of The American Conservative.

Comment. It is insulting, and borderline antisemitic, of you to describe traditional
Talmudic scholarship as
"content-free" and "meaningless esoterica." The Talmud is chock full of content and very
meaningful.

Response. Is it? Then I can only say that I am surprised how little actual good has come
out of all those centuries of
intensive study. A person who has devoted his life to the study of Judaic texts ought, if those texts have meaningful
content, to be wiser, better
equipped to live in the world, better, than a person who hasn't. Is this actually the case?

Possibly it is. I didn't mean to insult anyone, and in fact I confess to a slight regret over this remark. By
way of excusing myself, let
me say that my own early training — my first degree, in fact — was in mathematics. Now, studying
math at the higher levels
makes you a terrible intellectual snob. No other discipline has the standards of rigor required in mathematics. Of
course, none really can have,
so this is a very unfair point of view. It is, though, one that mathematicians find hard to avoid. "When you've
worked on a farm, nothing
else ever seems like work," said J.K. Galbraith. Similarly, when you've studied higher math, nothing else really
seems like study. For this
reason, I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always
willing to be convinced. I
guess this attitude shows in my review.

Now, pure mathematics is a very peculiar thing. Consider the man I have just written a book about, for example,
the 19th-century German
mathematician Bernhard Riemann. On June 10, 1854, Riemann delivered a paper to the faculty of Göttingen
University. In that paper he laid
out the fundamental ideas of Riemannian geometry, a challenging and very beautiful branch of pure mathematics which he
thought up entirely out of
his own head. Riemann's ideas were pure intellection, rooted in some philosophical ideas about the nature of space.
They had no conceivable
practical application. It was sixty years before Albert Einstein picked them up and used them as the basis for the
General Theory of Relativity.

The kind of pure intellection that Talmudic scholars immerse themselves in is as abstract and, from a worldly
point of view, useless as
Riemannian geometry … but there is never an Einstein. Talmudic concepts never have any real fruit in the
world of men. Talmudic
scholarship consists (it seems to me) of racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears.

Another influence on the way I think about this is my own studies of Chinese history and culture. Candidates
for the Imperial examinations
in old China had to engage in the same kind of years-long concentrated study of huge masses of accumulated written
material that Talmudic scholars
have to master. At the end of their studies, for the Imperial examinations, the Chinese scholars had to write an
"eight-legged essay"
— that is, one conforming to certain traditional patterns of style and presentation. You can find
translations of prize-winning
"eight-legged essays" in books about Chinese culture. I have one here. It is gibberish. It is
content-free. However, if you passed the
exam, you got a lifetime job as a Mandarin, a guaranteed income, and a choice of breeding partners.

The attitude of the Chinese themselves to the material these scholars had to master is encapsulated in the old
proverb: "Learning is
like a brick, which you can use to break down a door. When you have broken down the door, you can throw away the
brick!"

Comment. "A scathing ad hominem attack on Kevin MacDonald."

Response. If you think my review was "a scathing ad hominem attack," you
don't get out much. I can do
"scathing ad hominem" stuff when I feel like it. See
here, for example. In the case of The Culture of Critique, I
did not feel like it, because (a) I believe Kevin MacDonald is an honest man, and (b) I don't feel sure enough about my
understanding of his
theories to attack them with real confidence. I therefore dealt with the book respectfully, and gave the author the
benefit of most doubts. The
entire ad hominem content of the review is at the very end, where I express the opinion that Kevin is
"prickly" and
"unworldly." If you think that is "scathing," well, as I said, you really should try to
get out of the house more.

Since the ad hominem issue has been raised, here is what I really think about Kevin MacDonald: I think
he is a reactionary.
There's nothing much wrong with that. Some of my personal heroes were reactionaries. Chesterton was a reactionary;
Evelyn Waugh was certainly a
reactionary. George Orwell was a reactionary, though of a subtle and contradictory kind. "In love with
1910," said one of his friends.
Kevin MacDonald is in love with 1950. As I said in my review (and as he confirms in his response to my review), Kevin
would like to restore the
white-Gentile ethnic dominance of American society, as it was fifty years ago. I don't (again, as I said in my review)
find this particularly
objectionable. I just think it's a fantasy — ain't gonna happen. Kevin's entitled to his dreams, though;
and he is certainly entitled
to argue that the social arrangements of fifty years ago were superior to those of today. In some respects, I agree
with him about this.

Comment. You ask rhetorically: "Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492
expulsions?" Of course she
was worse off. The 16th century was Spain's golden age!

Response. Nonsense. The Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, and the flood of silver from
the New World were disasters
for Spain. The first and second led to the stifling of intellectual life; the third to chronic inflation, the
impoverishment of the peasantry, the
sapping of commercial energy, and rule by an arrogant plutocracy of nobles, with the cortes (parliament) sidelined.
Spain sank into a long
stagnation, from which she did not really recover until the latter 20th century. Do I really need to argue the
downside of despotic imperialism to
readers of The American Conservative? Spain should have kept her Jews. England re-admitted hers in the
1640s. Two hundred years later,
she was the greatest commercial power in the world.

For further insight into this topic, you might go
here, and try clicking first
on the maps of France,
Britain, and Germany, then on Spain's. Of course, all sorts of reasons might be adduced for this curious case of
national creative failure, but in
my own mind I am clear about the most important reason: Not enough Jews!

[Some years later, in February 2009, I got the following interesting
email from a Talmudic scholar.
It's tangential to the main discussion, but too good to leave out.]

——————————

Mr. Derbyshire — Among the things available at your site, I found the following comment:

"The kind of pure intellection that Talmudic scholars immerse themselves in is as abstract and,
from a worldly point of view,
useless as Riemannian geometry … but there is never an Einstein. Talmudic concepts never have any real
fruit in the world of men.
Talmudic scholarship consists (it seems to me) of racing the engine of the brain without engaging the
gears."

The response this deserves is much longer than I am willing to write, and, I suspect, longer than you are
willing to read. However, I can't
resist commenting on one particular facet: the mathematical one.

As an amateur mathematician and a Yeshiva student, I was naturally inclined to look for mathematical wisdom in
the Talmud. It's quite
disappointing in this respect. For the Talmud itself, π is three, the diagonal of a square is 1.4 times the side,
there is no hint of e,
and so on. On the whole, this is not surprising, since these things were needed only for the most ordinary uses. a
rough approximation is often
enough. Later medieval scholars did point out that these were only approximations, but they didn't feel any need to
improve on them as a rule.

Still, even for rough calculations, one needs some rough version of the Pythagorean theorem. The Talmud deals
with laws, and the laws deal
with the real world. Since the real world is Euclidean, one does need some working knowledge of euclidean geometry.

In this connection I had something of a surprise. I'll spare you the details, unless you're very interested. The
bottom line is that one
Talmudic commentator, the Rash Mishantz, came to the conclusion that a section of the Talmud required that the diagonal
of a 20 by 30 rectangle have
length 32 or less. [Note by JD: The actual length of the diagonal is an irrational
number whose first twenty digits
are 36.055512754639892931.] He then points out that, according to the "theorem of the wise men of
measurement," the diagonal
must be a bit more than 36. this is because

362 = 1296 < 1300
= (20)2 + (30)2

The theorem in question is clearly the Pythagorean theorem. He states it exactly he even gives a proof for the
special case when the
triangle is isosceles as well as being right angled. It's also fairly clear that he was capable of using it.

So, according to the Rash, the Talmud contradicts the Pythagorean theorem. What's the conclusion, then? Of
course, the Pythagorean
theorem must be false. We've given a proof of a special case, but it must not generalize to the general theorem.

You might think this supports the idea that we're dealing with "pure intellection," completely
abstract. But no, the Rash has one
more thing to say. In case you doubt his conclusion, he says "and it is easy to draw this and check it," in
other words, just check and see
that the Pythagorean theorem is false.

Of course, it is indeed easy to draw, and see that the Pythagorean theorem is true, at least to a good
approximation. Presumably the Rash
did make a rough drawing himself. However, he was so confident of the truth of divine Revelation, when in conflict with
"Greek wisdom,"
that he managed to get the answer wrong.

I'd say that the problem here is not that we're dealing with a "content-free" type of study. On the
contrary, we're dealing with
something of direct relevance to any technological enterprise. Nor is the way of thinking completely abstract, the Rash
is quite willing to
do experiments, at least so he says. Nor are we dealing with stupid people. Two generations after the Rash, his
special-case proof had
been generalized to a proof of the full theorem, a proof quite different from the one given in Euclid.

The central problem here seems to be hubris. The Talmud is Tora, after all, divine revelation, and all
wisdom is in it. It's not
possible that the godless gentiles really have that much to teach us. So actually studying Euclid would practically be
heresy. even doing your
experiment too carefully would indicate too much in the way of doubt of the teachings.

That's why "there is never an Einstein" in this field. You can't really criticize your predecessors,
not enough to allow mistakes to be
systematically removed, or to allow models to be improved. Yes, talmudic study allows a lot in the way of internal
criticism, maybe
more than Christian or Moslem systems. Still, it's nothing like the culture of science. Also, you can't learn from
non-Jews, or from
non-religious Jews, at least not too much and not too openly. Contrast this with mathematics, where a Jew, Lipa Bers,
develops the theory of
Teichmüller, an enthusiastic Nazi.

In case you want to follow this up: the Rash Mishantz is also known as R. Shimshon of Shantz, Rabeinu Shimshon
of Sens, or Samson ben Abraham
of Sens. The section of the talmud in question is the Mishna in Kilayim 5,5.